


Distinction

by missmuffet



Category: The Losers (2010), The Losers (Comic), The Losers - All Media Types
Genre: "Let's watch Jensen get himself killed" was announced for a reason, Aftermath of Torture, Bad Spanish, Canon Typical Violence, Drunk Sex, Hostage Situation, M/M, Personal Canon, Pre Aisha, Serial killers who lure you in with attempts at seduction, Strangulation, Vague references to said torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-01
Updated: 2013-02-01
Packaged: 2017-11-27 18:16:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,594
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/664994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/missmuffet/pseuds/missmuffet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>From the heavy scent of dark chocolate on their breath to the roughness of their hands, they were distinctly not Cougar. From his dark hair, cut too short to match greasy black strands, and the slightest hint of facial hair, he was impossibly like Cougar. But in the back of his clouded head, Jensen knew the truth; they were distinctly not Cougar. But if he closed his eyes tight enough, he could pretend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Distinction

**Author's Note:**

  * For [compos_dementis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/compos_dementis/gifts).



> Firstly, Jensen's Spanish is intentionally bad. Secondly, yes, Jensen is the one to initiate the sex here, however, he doesn't expect to nearly get killed afterwards.

  
**I.**  
There is a room in South America that deserved to be burned straight into the fucking ground. Better yet, there was an entire compound in a drug ridden country, full of counterfeit makers and gangs that merited nothing more than to be torched until there was nothing but ash, until there was nothing left but a linger memory that still needed to be pushed deep enough under the surface so it would never return. There were three stolen humvees parked outside of the compound, a series of wires and pressure sensors hidden beneath the brush and the dirt, a shitty satellite that did nothing to pick up any usual internet connection and at least one destroyed room of smashed in computers with keyboards missing half of their keys.   
  
Someone could follow the path of linoleum flooring – dirtied by too many boots, complete with worn in impressions that scraped along its surface – but that was only because it had long since been abandoned. It wasn’t always so safe, it probably never had been before, and it was the last reminder he can’t stand to know still existed. The fact that he could still remember it came only from the panic of clawing at the walls with two barely functioning hands, burnt with deep cuts crisscrossing over his palms.  
  
(“You.... you can't bust up a hacker's fingers, his hand too bad. Do that and he's useless, if he's useless then he's...”)  
  
 _Dead._  
  
Even now he couldn’t bring himself to voice the remainder or try to without feeling his throat close up on him, but he remembered whispering that piece of advice to Cougar once, a long time after. His voice was hoarse and quavered, betrayed his unsettlement and stood to remind them both that there was a reason he had been near silent for weeks instead of chattering on absently, without providing the broken, recovering team with a new fact of the fact no one wanted to know.  
  
 He couldn’t count the number of times the Mexican had smacked him that night with that _God damn_ hat of his or how many times he had been punched somewhere on his arm because he’d rather deny the fit he had just undergone – superimposing that room of broken computers he had been held in for months over the shitty hotel room they were currently in – than admit that there was even a reason he couldn’t stand to be in cramped dark places anymore.   
  
Because the was a room in South America that was loosely associated with the snapping thought of, _**“I fucking hate Canadians,”**_ and the smell hot metal or dry ice meeting with human flesh for too long. There was a room in South America that he had spent the better part of too many months tied down against something, with his ankle handcuffed to chain that was wrapped and padlocked to the desk stacked high with ruined electronics. There was a room filled with smoke and an eerie silence from down that hall that sent his nerves into overdrive.  
  
Jensen needed to hear noise, any kind of sound; just as much as he needed air to breathe or water he was denying himself, as there was distinctly no noise coming down the hall from where he had seen them drag his teammate to. Little to no noise came from his makeshift holding cell but that was because Jensen continued to ramble and chatter to himself; he distracted his mind with anything other than the deafening silence or what they did to try to force him into decrypting or sneaking his way into INTERPOL’s database for them. So it was hardly their scare tactics and knowing what exactly would happen to his leg once they removed the dry ice clamped down for at least half an hour that taught Jensen to stop fighting back.  
  
It was their smirks and the confidence in their walk that replaced their growing frustration because of him. It was the dabs of blood that decorated one of their shoulders, without any puncture wound, and the faint sound of someone fumbling with a belt down the hall. It wasn’t the pain in Jensen’s lip from biting through it so many times and it wasn’t the guns they like to threaten him with that did the trick. What broke his will to fight back wasn’t traditional by any means and it wasn’t one of the practiced ways the government attempted to prepare him for. What broke Jacob Jensen was a butchered pronunciation of English, a mix of a too-thick accent that taunted him with a simple sentence.   
  
_“He asked about you.”_ It came laced with the threat of knowing the other’s lifeline was now directly proportional to his readiness to cooperate.  
  
He had never counted the days by streams of light breaking into his disgustingly hot and rancid smelling holding room before. Suddenly, their smirks gave him reason to reach back deep into his head for scattered memories and old mathematical friends as his captors kneeled in front of him, jerking his face up to force eye contact. “How long can a man survive without food and water?”   
  
It was the threat of a sack of bones down the hall that broke him.  
  
Jensen’s mind reeled for the answer, tuned out the blend of Spanish and English that come from them as he worked. How many days? How long has it been? For the first time since their capture, Jensen’s mouth became occupied with screaming through the night instead of simply remembering how to breathe.   
  
**II.**  
What made him give up entirely has nothing to do with the certainty that they didn’t heed his begging for them to pass on his own rations of water and scraps of food to the other. What forced him to give up was a body too worn to fight off being dragged down the hall, in the complete opposite direction he wished to move in. What forced him to give up was not the movement itself but rather the resounding thud his body made when it was dropped into a wooden box in the ground. What forced him to give up was the darkness, the feel of a thousand tiny mouths biting into every inch of him and the truth even he couldn’t distract himself from.  
  
    It was impossible to dig yourself out of your own grave.  
  
 **III.**  
  
    There was a room in South America that he hated enough to plot out ways to off the entire country of Columbia clean from the map. What did it do for the good US of A, anyway? Absolutely nothing. It caused nothing but hardship and trouble for the Secret Service and CIA operatives who made the mistake of being taken alive because they couldn’t bear the thought of putting a bullet in the heads of themselves and their best friend when they knew someone was waiting for them to come home. When you hadn’t seen a bright eyed, blonde girl since Christmas and you promised her a weekend camping with just the two of you for her birthday, you just couldn’t do something like that. But when there was a room in South America you feared more than anything else, Jensen was (luckily) living proof that it slowly made you hate any kind of shit-hole you found yourself stuck in.   
  
_(“How do you trick a psychiatrist?” asked Clay. Weeks had passed since Pooch had been assigned the duty of shoving pills and juice down Jensen’s throat. Jensen was just only now starting to bulk back up but he had already learnt how to hide the tremble in his hands once night overtook the skies.)_  
  
    … Which meant that Jensen was pretty sure he hated Bolivia just as much as he did Columbia.   
  
     The hotel room in Bolivia smelt just the same as the one their original one when the team crashed in after Jensen and Cougar had been ‘recovered’, as the paperwork so aptly put it. Smokes and scotch, cramped with one bed and unlike when they had been rescued, the bed was to bed split unless one of them would rather take the floor. It never ended like that but there were more than enough nights Jensen found himself locked out of lest he walk in on Cougar with some local girl he had picked up off the streets or from the bar. Doing so would hardly be advisable. He trusted the Mexican to have his back during missions – he didn’t trust Cougar’s temper when it was directed at him.   
  
    On nights like those he would either press his back against the seemingly paper-thin wall across from their door and wait it out, or he’d venture to beg Pooch and Roque to give him a blanket and some floor space. He never asked the Colonel - he’d rather deal with Cougar’s nasty sheets than Clay’s. Once or twice a minor shouting match would ensue the next day, jealousy hot on Jensen’s breath while teases about disease wove their way in and out of the argument, but on most nights, after sweating in the doll factory together, they got along just fine. Splendid, even. He would babble on about something nostalgic he’d likely never see again and Cougar would lean back either pretending to listen or wishing he didn’t have to listen.   
  
    Tonight was no exception. “You’re wasting our money,” Jensen murmured with a grin, into his second helping of some Spanish marked booze. Cougar had been the Loser in charge of buying their drinks tonight while the Colonel and Roque attended yet another cock fight. Pooch was…god only knew where, probably staring out into the distance or sighing at his bobble head Chihuahua. Cougar lifted an eyebrow questioningly at the American before shrugging his shoulders. Cougar had yet to finish his first drink. Jensen, if only because of knowing the sniper’s ethnicity, was more than prepared to bet that whatever he was drinking involved tequila. He wouldn’t know. Jensen hardly bothered with anything more than the seasonal Sam Adams, or whatever was on tap when he and Cougar snuck off base for something that didn’t remind the younger solider about MREs and the Middle East. (Or if he could get his hands on it, Jamaican rum with milk and cream.)   
  
    “I mean it. We scrape in hardly ten dollars during the week between us and on a night when it’s worth splurging, you’re not even having a good time. Take it from the pirates and British Navy; drink up,  matey, for you’ll never have a better gift than the present. ” That questioning look from his comrade only grew as he spoke. Even Cougar seemed to pick up that Jensen was mixing up his quotations. If it weren’t for the fact that Jensen had gone through the entire discography of The Kinks already, the fumble would have been amusing. Instead, Cougar was left at the mercy of a mind too smart and too easily distracted for its own good. Worse still, Jensen wasn’t even close to be drunk.   
  
    Much to the annoyance of his team, he did shit like that when he was sober.   
  
    “Just checking to see if you were still with me. We do have reason to celebrate, you know. Something momentous has happened today – tonight, I meant,” he babbled without so much of a pause between the different streams of thought. “And just what, you ask? The answer is simple – simpler than using binary opposites to define one another – you, sir, are for once completely and totally without a fine little _señorita_ in your lap.” Cougar’s steel toed boot met with his shin under the table at the exact same moment he was offered a too cheerful, _“Salud.”_  
  
 **IV.**  
  
    Somewhere between them both agreeing that simply jumping the first guy they saw outside the bar of his money would give them more money than working tomorrow, and Jensen starting to fall silent for the first time all evening, he lost track of the sniper. The simple fact that Cougar had managed to do just that when the other man sat just across from him discouraged the once SIG-INT officer from finishing off his current drink. He set the glass and looked around. No sign of Cougar anywhere. **“…bastard.”**  
  
    Cougar was once again lived up to his name. He must have run off with another mochaccino babe – and, yes, he had been slapped twice for playing the stuttering fool and calling women that whilst trying not to stare – which meant that sooner or later, the younger man would come to fetch him. A scolding was to be expected as they both learnt the ‘fun’ way that Jensen was not someone who could be trusted to wander the streets alone when he was drunk. He had the tattoo to prove it;  an broken animal skull, perhaps a bison or something else that seems quite ferocious when he was tripping-over-his-own-feet-drunk, inked into his left bicep. A lingering memory and for once, a pleasant one even though he couldn’t recall what happened between Cougar explaining _Dia de los Muertos_ to him as Jensen dug through a doughy treat for a bone of some sort, and then waking up in the morning with bruises dotting across his fresh.  
  
    No, he didn’t lose a fight to a tractor trailer. _“Stairs,”_ and an angry, guilty look from Cougar. So he had tripped and busted his ass, by the look of it. That was a first. Cougar just hadn’t been there to snatch him up by the collar before it happened, he wasn’t there to parallel always having his front sight aimed just short of the blonde’s back. Jensen couldn’t have cared less; if a man couldn’t take the consequences of a few too many shots of tequila (that was right… Cougar had bought their drinks both times) then he shouldn’t have had it in the first place but now…  
  
    History did repeat itself. He felt himself bump into someone, some young stud too concerned with keeping their girl away from prying eyes. _“Lo sien… siento,”_ he slurred as he tripped past on past. For a moment, he slipped off his glasses, squinting to see if the dizzy, blurry edges around everything he was passing came from dirty lenses or being drunker than he’d ever like to admit. If he remembered correctly, the night back in Mexico where he had gotten his second tattoo, he had only claimed to be tipsy. If that was the case, then now, he was absolutely shit-faced drunk.   
  
    Just short of setting his glasses back on, he could have sworn he caught sight of his friend. “Cougar!” His shout tumbled out like it was two different words as he stumbled forward, blindly crossing the street as always. “Cougs, Cougs….” Cougar had his back to him. Jensen tried to focus on the Spanish being passed between the man and two others but with the rapid pace mixed in with slang left the hacker unable to recognize more than pronouns and a few verbs. Jensen grasped onto the back of the white shirt, unable to recall Cougar walked out of the hotel with a dark blue top or that the man he thought was Cougar wasn’t wearing that trademark hat he had purchased for him while recovering from South America.  
  
    (It was his fault Cougar lost the original, smaller and distinctly not a cowboy hat.)   
  
The stranger reeled around. _“¿Qué dijo?”_  
  
Jensen pulled back and stuttered another apology. “I – I’m _mira por mi amigo…”_ He didn’t learn Spanish from Cougar or from watching Dora the Explorer with his supposed niece. In fact, he reckoned to say he didn’t know Spanish at all. The only Spanish he knew was passed around the factory, orders given out and of course, things whispered or hissed to him back in a room with broken computers on the wrong side of a too quiet hallway. He didn’t know how to conjugate verbs probably because he didn’t know any tense other than the present tense and he never could be bothered to learn the difference between formal and informal conjugations. Why would he when simply taking on _–as_ or _–es_ worked for most of the time.   
  
“He’s a … _un vaquero…”_ They were laughing at him now, only shaking his head up worse as he continued to grip on the stranger for balance. Someone behind him shoved at his back and he ended up in the arms of a smirking Cougar wannabe who spoke… much faster than Cougar ever had, even back before the disaster of the school back in Afghanistan when he had first met the other, with more words, too many that Jensen only half understood. He had been down this route only once before, stumbling the streets looking for his friend who made the mistake of taking his eyes off of him but naturally, Jensen didn’t remember it any better than why his wallet was missing the morning he woke up with a fresh, albeit badass, tattoo beginning to heal.   
  
While he dully remembered choosing to let it grow infected so that his skin would rise up along the black lines, he nodded at the fuzzy Spanish words. Did he want something? He had half a mind to think that the word they used actually meant _‘to desire’_ but desire and want, that was all the same thing, wasn’t it? Vaguely, he translated one of the conjugations for _ser_ in his mind as they spoke and grinned. Sloppy and stupid. If Cougar thought he had seen him drunk before but Cougar would be entirely wrong. When Jensen was drunk, he fell silent and all his yesterdays meshed in with the present. He couldn’t tell the difference between the drink currently in his hand and a bottle of champagne split for two, on the floor of a recently purchased house containing only a mattress in the middle of the floor for two, for him and her to playfully fight over rights to the blankets on cold nights before she rolled into his protective arms. An all too rare sight of Jensen falling silent happened when he was drunk.  
  
Jensen needed noise. He craved it more than anything else in the world. It forced his favorite computers to be not handy, portable netbooks with faster severs than old PCs, but ones with keyboards of spring filed keys that clicked and clacked as his fingers flew over them. Those were his favorite because there was no way to hush their sound. Jensen was addicted to noise, to always having a song stuck in his head and fingers strumming against his thigh because when he didn’t have that… when the world around him fell quiet it brought him back to desperately clawing at a wooden casket with fingers that had their nails ripped it. It took him back to dark houses without the classics like Queen, Meatloaf, Journey and Bob Dylan blaring as usual, without the glare of a television screen left on because a certain midwife that never had a chance to wait up couldn’t fall asleep without noise. It took Jensen back to a time where stepping through his familiar door, his sneakers squelched in a puddle of something wet and congealing, a time where that paired with the silence meant he didn’t need to tread further to discover what he already had figured out, what he prayed against with every shaking breath.  
  
    Jensen couldn’t stand the silence but a high concentration of alcohol in his veins forced him into silence just so that he could assure himself that the rest of the world hadn’t grown stiff and cold without him. If there was noise then there was life. If there was life, there was a reason to pull the trigger to defend it, a reason to keep breathing. In his quiet huffs of breath as he laughed – yes, he was very much lost, he admitted. He was forced to remain unsure if they had understood him or not until he sees the Cougar look alike curls his fingers in a come hither motion, a gesture that earned his complete and total interpretation. _“Vamanos,”_ he was told. That _did_ happen to be one of the words Dora had taught him, and had he been sober, he’d have gladly burst out into the traveling theme song for the misery of his companions en route to Cougar.  
  
    Certainly they could take him nowhere else.  
  
 **V.**  
  
    Downstairs, music blared. Jensen had half a mind to think he had heard the song before, maybe on a lunch break at the doll factory, maybe during leave just before entering Bolivia. An old beat pulsed, reminiscent of the disco and platform shoe days decades ago. The ex-soldier couldn’t help but smirk at the fact he couldn’t hear what on earth his new friend could possibly be saying. Just minutes ago, a good ten minute walk from the cantina, he pressed his numb lips together and apart to offer one more fact, as his stomach grew less and less trusting of their journey. _“Llama esta – ”_ he needed to stop and laugh, unable to remember the last time he had called dark haired man by his real name. After a snicker, he added in the name that would earn a smack to his head any time he dared to utter it. “Carlos – no, _Carlito.”_ Cougar was at least a good head short than Jensen was.   
  
_“No me diga… y yo tambien.”_ Something was misleading in that man’s voice. Jensen couldn’t realize just what that gnawing feeling in his cut was until his new ‘friend’ pushed him into a room and didn’t bother closing the door all the way. It was dark, save for the faint stream of light coming from the hall. It was hardly the much thinner arm that suddenly tugged him in close by his waist the finally tipped him off to the fact that Cougar was absolutely nowhere near this room, but the simple fact that Cougar wouldn’t allow his friend to be forced and trapped (now the door was suddenly closed and locked) into such an all consuming darkness. Not when he knew better than to leave Jensen wondering if the distance between the walls was shrinking and if the sound in his ears, of dirt being shoveled back over him, was real or not.   
  
**VI.**  
  
If Jensen could bring himself to care, he was completely able to leave right there. But the hacker had ceased caring quite some time ago. Much to the surprise of his new ‘friend’, Jensen was the one to pull the stranger in for a kiss. From the heavy scent of dark chocolate on their breath to the roughness of their hands, they were distinctly **not** Cougar. From his dark hair, cut too short to match greasy black strands, and the slightest hint of facial hair, he was impossibly **like** Cougar. But in the back of his clouded head, Jensen knew the truth; they were distinctly not Cougar. But if he closed his eyes tight enough, he could pretend.   
  
**VII.**  
  
His dinosaurs made it look easy. Stupid, childish and pain free.   
  
His dinosaurs had been abandoned at the compound site, lost from the truck’s trunk when the firefight began and his mind screamed at him to move faster, to bring the children up into his arms and kiss their foreheads reassuringly and promise them they would be safe even if at the time, he barely spoke a lick of Spanish. His dinosaurs had been forgotten, haphazardly left behind to rot just as he would be by the next morning. By the time morning’s light did hit his face he would be unable to recall which cued his body after their consummation to thrash, to set itself on the autopilot every man that walked out of Special Forces possessed. Was it that realization or was it the set of hands at his throat?  
  
 **VIII.**  
  
In America, if someone shouted or screamed loud enough, the police would come either to a victim’s rescue or to walk them through the process of seeking some sort of justice or closure. In Bolivia, those hands at your neck were eventually replaced by a rope.  
  
 **IX.**  
  
    The next morning, Jensen was late for work. It wasn’t for a lack of bodily response; he was quite awake by the time the sun appeared, an entire hour before he was due at the factory. Instead of reorienting himself and heading straight there, he kept his head down and made for their hotel room. By the time he reached it, Cougar was already gone, presumably to work. (Jensen needed his friend beside him if he had any hope of holding a job; Spanish seemed to be the only thing that drew Cougar from his normally quiet and observant shell.) If he had to take a guess as to why the room was abandoned, his money would be on knowing that if both of them missed a day of work,  getting fired was a guarantee  – not because anyone was out looking for him.  
  
 **X.**  
  
    A quick, hot shower brought an angry flush over his ordinarily insipid skin tone. At the mirror, he rubbed at the long, trailing bruises around his throat. A noticeable pair of hands and a skinner, darker mark from the rope stare back at him. One bite mark at between his shoulders and  the crook of his neck looked deep enough that it had drawn blood and could possibly scar in a few teeth shaped notches. The best he could do was dress, still wet, and search through the near empty room for one of Cougar’s two scarves. Jensen snatched one up and awkwardly curled it around his neck; he would have much preferred it to be the larger one that Cougar usually wore but it would appear that the other man had it to shelter his neck from the hot sun.  
  
    This one had a checkered pattern of dark blue, black and a lighter brown. It smelt of sweat and salt, quite possibly laced with the perfume of a recent lay of Cougar’s. Jensen couldn’t be bothered to complain under his breath as he half ran his way up and up to the doll factory.   
  
**XI.**  
  
    It was almost ironic, in that twisted **_Catwoman-and-Batman-could-have-lived-happily-ever-after_** sort of way. The scarf bobbed up against his chin as he ran. Sure enough he came to realize exactly what the scarf truly smelt like. It twisted his stomach and forced a laugh to come to surface. Bitterly, he can’t help but think that if it really had been Cougar last night, his knees wouldn’t have the tremble in them like they did now.  
  
If it was Cougar, it might have even been okay.   
  
More than once on his way between dodging bustling pedestrians he brought it up to nose to inhale the familiar scent. It had nothing to do with damning Cougar on nights he and the Colonel both got lucky then left the trio of Pooch, Jensen and Roque to shake their heads as they joked about which of the men would be quicker to fire. It mattered not that the flimsy piece of fabric truly did smell of sweat, grease, dust and gunpowder.  
  
    The scarf smelt distinctly like Cougar.  
  
    The smell made him feel safe.   
  
**XII.**  
  
    He was only so fortunate that the factory did not lock its doors like the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory did. One of the men that worked at the station near the window caught sight of Jensen’s pleading look and only because the gringo had saved his hija from some abusive novio, did Miguel help to smuggle Jensen inside. A hangover ravished his mind; the words to ask if the foreman had been around for his morning inspection yet don’t come. All that could be managed was a concerned filled, _“Los jefes…?”_  
  
The Bolivian man shook his head and ducked Jensen under his station for a moment. _“No estan aqui. ¿Qué paso?”_ Miguel asked. A hand kept Jensen’s head down for a moment until the coast was clear.  
  
    Jensen managed something about ‘hombres’ that were ‘muy malo’ before he caught sight of the foreman. With just seconds left to make it to his station, he made a break for it. Nearly falling off his chair after his landing, he looked up to see a pile of three dolls already stacked high for him. “What…” Without fail, a familiar leather hat hit his arm hard enough to snap him into attention, reach for another doll and try so very hard not to meet Cougar in the eyes.  
  
     _“What. Happened?”_ Cougar demanded. He must have recognized his own scarf – no shit, Sherlock – as did several other of the workers because there were several pairs of eyes on them now.   
  
    The foreman hovered behind them. Jensen nearly dropped the doll he was trying to dress in a bright red outfit. “I,” he began, voice hoarse, once the foreman had moved on. Too many eyes, not enough noise, no Cougar whistling a cheerful tune. _“Tengo un gripe.”_ Cougar won’t get another word out of him, not a single one.  
  
 **XIII.**  
  
    That night, Cougar tattled on him to the Colonel.  Clay, the self assumed father figure of their motley crew, set his hand on Jensen’s shoulder. “What’s this I hear about you having a run in with ‘bad men’?” Despite his scruffy appearance, Clay could soften his voice enough reassure even a child. But for a grown man whose head was lost between the pages of old family photos he would never get to see again, a man who couldn’t bear to raise even a shaky tune or act even remotely civil, it did nothing.  
  
    Jensen merely rolled on his side and buried his face in that scarf.   
  
**IXX.**  
  
    Day two passed the same as day three and four. He had ended up switching bedrooms out with Roque by settling himself in on the bed he and Pooch split, refusing to move. Roque would rather save the argument of ‘mine, not yours’ for another day than risk being the one who had coddle Jensen if something had indeed happened. Pooch, ever the married man, kindly shook him awake each day before he left for work at the autoshop. Cougar was already outside his new door, eyes expectant and demanding. _“Tell me.”_ The words were firm but soft and they fell on deaf ears.  
  
 **XX.**  
  
An entire week passed before Cougar must have been disgustingly reminded of Jensen’s behavior when they had been rescued from Columbia. That meant Cougar lasted an entire week before he shoved Jensen against the wall, before he shouted for the other to _stop **fucking** around_. The blonde only cringed and dropped his head. The Mexican’s seething worry grew tenfold.  
  
 **XXI.**  
  
Two weeks in; Jensen’s movements at the factory all come off as mechanical. Like some teenaged cliché, the man stared off into the distance as he worked. Sober as ever, Jacob Jensen says not a single word. The only concern on his mind was the worn, dirty scarf around his neck. Too many nights have passed since decorating his neck with it and too many days have passed that he dressed or undressed with the minimum amount contact to his neck and shoulders. The mirror was to be avoided at all costs. Too many nights have passed; enough that a crushing thought envelops his entire thought process.   
  
He still had the key to his original room. He still had a scarf that wasn’t his. The bathroom door was carelessly ajar as he entered; he closed the door to the room as quietly as possible. Quieter still, he crept his way to the bathroom, glancing from the floor to the sink he at last spotted his target – Cougar’s usual, thick scarf. Ragged hands snatched it up, glad that the water to the shower was still running by the time he crept back out. Sinking down to the edge of the bed, Jensen allowed the fabric around his neck to unwind and fall to the floor, then brought the fresh scarf up and pressed his face into it.  
  
Cougar had always promised to have his back, no matter what. He promised it the first day he was introduced to their team, the day where Pooch ended up in a cast after crashing, because the man who had been covering them previously, missed taking out the men in bushes. The radio lines were all fucked up because Jensen had to busy himself with clearing the route instead of the task he had been assigned, and he ended up with a knife embedded in his leg.   
  
Cougar had promised that he was watching him, always, back in Mexico when they were both on leave and Jensen decided to follow the youngest member of their team. He was watching and it spoke legions; promises never to miss, never to abandon or betray the quintet and to steer Jensen away from bars which might contain enraged older brothers of pretty girls.   
  
Cougar promised. He promised and the original stolen scarf smelt like Jensen now, so how could he remember any of that? But this one had been worn in, nice and soft, this one still had that lingering scent. Eyes pressed closed, tight enough so that Jensen could pretend. For the first time in weeks, he let out a shuttering curse, “Motherfucker,” because there used to be one room in South America that deserved to be burned straight into the fucking ground.  
  
But now there were two.  
  
  



End file.
